About Yoshi Takada

My Story

I grew up in Japan, and until my late teens, Japan was the only world I knew. I wanted to see more of it, and I wanted to play basketball at a higher level. So at the start of my junior year of high school, I moved to Oklahoma to attend high school in the U.S.

I arrived speaking zero English, in a place where I had no family and not a single acquaintance. I wasn’t there as a sheltered exchange student. I sat in the same classes as everyone else and played the full season with the team. Communicating with people, keeping up in class, learning English, training for basketball. I built all of it from the ground up, every single day.

From there, I attended Central Christian College in Kansas before transferring to San Diego State University, where I studied Business Management, influenced in part by watching my father run his own company back in Japan. The transfer process is where most Japanese students get stuck, and I walked through every step of it myself.

After graduating, I started my career in Los Angeles. I relocated to West Virginia, then moved back to Los Angeles again. I worked under American managers, and I managed people who had come from other countries. I lived the American side of both worlds, as a student and as a working professional.

By 2022, I had spent exactly 17 years in the United States. That was the same number of years I had spent growing up in Japan. That balance felt meaningful, and it felt like the right time to bring everything I had learned back home. I settled in Fukuoka, where I’ve been based ever since, building this next chapter of my career in Japan.

Those 17 years were not all smooth. In 2014, contact during a game completely fractured my left forearm. A few years later I broke the same spot the same way, and the arm alone has taken three surgeries. After that came lower-back pain, shoulder and hip problems, sciatica, and, once I was back in Japan, a torn meniscus. Every time I fought my way back and my body finally felt stable, something else would break down.

But I live by a motto: turn every setback into a chance to improve. What matters isn’t never falling down, it’s getting back up again and again. I’m about 172 cm, hardly built for dunking. I still put in the rehab and the training, brick by brick, and I’m still chasing dunks today. I write about that process on the jump training page.

Building a career, starting a business, learning a language: to me it all works the same way. You don’t level up or succeed all at once. Only when the small pieces finally take shape do you see the result. That’s why the support I offer, whether it’s Japanese, careers, or the move abroad itself, comes from a road I actually walked.

Who I work with